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"Dean and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider.:

Kinsley Gaffe: A mistake whereby a politician inadvertently says something truthful which they had not meant to reveal.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kinsley_gaffe

the typo was the Axios article, not from Google's own announcement
Absolute earthquake at Deepmind the last few months...
https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724

> Announcing Discovery Loop!

> I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.

That's..huge. Hassabis has been the most important figure of the last 15 years in AI.

Even in indirect ways. OpenAI itself was founded because Musk got fixated on "stopping" Hassabis.

can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.

Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.

Google's stock dropped 5% right away, 200billion of value
Deepmind always worked on some of the coolest architectures. Following things like AlphaStar, AlphaGo, and more were extremely exciting and felt like the hacker persona of machine learning. I hope Google can take advantage of this awesome team. They've done incredible work.
anybody watching the pace of output from Gemini team has been nothing but disappointing. meanwhile anthropic and openai has surpassed them.

I do wonder if anybody working at Google can give us an insight why the chaos and lack of competitiveness?

Between Shazeer and these guys

Looks like Gemini's sub-par performance is claiming heads

Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.
I think Google realized that it's more profitable to sell compute to AI labs than to make AI. They are not an ideologically driven company like Anthropic. They very much turned into a conventional company that just wants to protect the bottom line. This was evident even back when they had LAMDA and refused to release it.
Hassabis is being promoted to Chair of Deepmind
Who is going to be sitting on him?
Everyone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.
I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this.

OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people who truly believe in the economically transformative power of AI to work at Google since their benefits will be capped by Google being large + having public company obligations.

DeepMind is just a part of Google which does research stuff, and Google is a massive company that does loads of things but mostly sells ads.

OpenAI and Anthropic are in a completely different game, their primary business model is making a product out of advancements that come out of DeepMind and co.

its just simple as someone think he knows better than the engineer,

anthropic and open ai doesn't have those people currently as they are private.

(comment deleted)
So how many people from DeepMind have left now? Not looking too good for Google.
By the article, it looks like he's actually stepping up.
What happened to the "strike team" that Sergey Brin was leading to try and improve Gemini's coding performance?
End of an era for Alphabet.
It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.

The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.

> as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet

IS that a promotion or demotion ?

The first sentence is quite telling

>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…

Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought